Look up N or n in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈɛn/) is spelled en.^[1]

Contents 1 History of the forms 2 Usage 3 Codes for computing 4 See also 5 References

[edit] History of the forms

One of the most common snake hieroglyph was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English "J", because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet. It is speculated that Semitic people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because their word for "snake" may have begun with that sound. However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun, which means "fish" in some of these languages. The sound value of the letter was /n/—as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and all modern languages.

Egyptian hieroglyph for 'J'	Proto-Semitic N	Phoenician N	Etruscan N	Greek Nu

[edit] Usage

N represents the dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with <n> is <ng>, which represents a velar nasal in a variety of languages, usually positioned word-finally in English. In languages like Italian and French, <gn> represents a palatal nasal (/ɲ/). The Portuguese spelling for this sound is <nh>. In English, n is silent when it is preceded by an m, in words like hymn (although it is pronounced in words such as damnation).

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the lowercase [n] represents the alveolar nasal sound. A small capital [ɴ] represents the uvular nasal.

N is the second-most commonly used consonant in the English language (after T).

[edit] Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital N is codepoint U+004E and the lower case n is U+006E.

The ASCII code for capital N is 78 and for lowercase n is 110; or in binary 01001110 and 01101110, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital N is 213 and for lowercase n is 149.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "&#78;" and "&#110;" for upper and lower case respectively.

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: N

• Ń
• Ñ
• Ň
• П, п (П, п) - Pe (Cyrillic)
• Н, н (Н, н) - En (Cyrillic)
• Ν, ν - Nu (Greek)

The Basic modern Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter N with diacritics ŃńǸǹŇňÑñṄṅŅņṆṇṊṋṈṉN̈n̈ƝɲȠƞᵰᶇɳȵ history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646

[edit] References